


Roses In Ash

by Aphoride



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Bigotry & Prejudice, Community: HPFT, Contains profanity, Dark, Dual Timeline, Durmstrang, F/F, F/M, Friendship, Hope, It's not as grim and horrible as it sounds I swear, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Politics, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Pre-Goblet of Fire, Racism, Romance, Wizarding Politics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 16:55:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7230847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aphoride/pseuds/Aphoride
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Alternatively titled, 'Or, And On Its Axis, The World Tilts In Fire')</p>
<p>Nearly fifty years after the fall of Grindelwald, old scars and wounds linger, as do the ideologies which caused them - and some plan to use them for their own ends, no matter the collateral damage. Six years later, the Second War against Voldemort has been over for a year, the wounds scabbing over, and Hermione Granger is determined to force change: an end to pureblood bigotry and equal rights for muggleborns. </p>
<p>Viktor Krum is struggling to remember quite what hope is; that change does come, if slowly. There is poison in the past, but healing is still possible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eins

Eins

_You are not your grandfather._

They loop and curl about his vision, forming the flick on the end of the ‘y’, at the top of the ‘d’ and the ‘t’, deep red on the page, sunk into the very fabric of it, bleeding along the lines running through it in the dark-cream spot which marks where the coffee had hit it, soaking it and melting it almost. The letters are spikier, sloppier than usual, the author hurrying and rushing through them – impatient, perhaps, or angry.

Here and there a dot jabs through the parchment; every now and then a smudge where the ink hadn’t dried before the side of a hand swept over it.

Damning words, all five of them, and if it’s strange to see them written down, it’s even stranger that they linger on in his mind, long after the paper they’d been on had been burnt and the ash vanished with a contemptuous flick.

What does he need them for? He knows he isn’t his grandfather – his grandfather is dead, a hero of his time, of his people, an icon of courage and resistance against a brutal, dangerous, despotic regime; a sickly child and a sickly adult, passionate and principled to the core, with a love of Gobstones no one had ever explained. He is nothing like his grandfather.

His grandfather is famous for dying; for being executed by firing squad three days after attempting to murder the most dangerous man Europe had seen in two centuries. Stories passed around – rumours, whispers, myths – spoke of how even when they’d aimed, six men in a line, his back had been straight and he’d stood tall and proud. Stories spoke of the respect he’d gained from his enemy, of how Grindelwald had lamented the death, even as he signed his name and pressed the wax seal onto the bottom of the warrant.

_He is not my enemy, but the enemy of my dreams. He does no offence to me but to the state, and in this, I must obey the law._

In Bulgaria, in his family, those words resonate still. He knows them by heart, as do his uncles, his cousins, his aunts and his parents.

As does his grandmother’s fierce, shattered response, flung at the face of the man who returned her husband’s body to her, cloaked in the Bulgarian flag, offering condolences from the dictator he had failed to stop.

_But you are the law._

There had been no response – not that any of them had expected one. Who was Grindelwald, conqueror and liberator and visionary, to respond to a single woman’s grief? What did that matter, the death of a single man, when the law was followed and the greater good still lived?

It didn’t, was the answer, and it never would do when such things were impossible to reach, the people in power and the people on the ground separated from each other by a sea the size of the earth.

“Exactly!” Hermione said, a stray curl jumping to brush her mouth before dropping back to her shoulder, beaming at him over a pair of coffees. “It’s the difference. It’s all about the difference – really, it always has been, it’s just that no one ever noticed because they’d never been on the other side.”

She’s wearing a lavender cardigan, today, over navy blue robes, a small silver badge pinned to them, marking her out as a Magical Law Enforcement employee. With her hair down and her forearm covered, hiding the scars the war had given her, she looks happy – almost as though the war had never happened.

It had, though, and the signs are still there: behind the shining, painted posters and the sparkling glass windows littering the Alley, behind the sound of laughter and chatter and the sunshine which bounces off polished cauldrons and gold door handles. There are cracks, if you look for them, visible in the way people hush when they pass Raynott’s, built in place of Fortescue’s, and the covered marble pillars of Gringotts, scaffolding surrounding the dome which tops it, and the way smiles dip, wavering, talk and cheer enforced by sheer, stubborn determination more than anything else.

It looks like the days his father talks about, those grey days of slow recovery, when everything was simultaneously better and broken, and people found themselves lost.

Amongst it all, unscarred and alone and whole, he feels so out of place – so wrong in this recovering, defiant place – that he had almost turned around and sloped back home, catching an early Portkey back to Sofia.

What right did he have to mourn with them, to intrude on their rebuilding and remaking?

He had swallowed it all, though – the words and the feelings both – and found the café in the edges of Muggle London all the same.

A faint shower is falling, silver drops against a blue sky with a smattering of clouds dotted across it, and the breeze which buffets them, blowing and ruffling his hair, brings with it the cries of seagulls and the smell of salt, sour and wet and unmistakeable. Familiar and comfortable, it summons up a wash of nostalgia, tinted as it always is with the prickly, sticky guilt, and a sweeter, simpler happiness.

Distantly, he could hear the shouts and the calls across the deck of the ship, _die schwarze Drache_ as the students had long named her, as the ropes creaked in the wind and the sails flapped, rattling on their binds as the breeze punched into their bellies. Flashes of blonde and black and red as figures darted about making the final preparations before leaving, the gangplank stowed safely away, and Anastasiy and Nikita Kozlov began to winch the anchor up out of the water.

The wind in the sails had always reminded Viktor of a horse: headstrong and impatient to leave, to run, champing at the bit and stamping at the ground; the material of the sail pulled taut, the force of it stilling them, the double-headed eagle in gold and red bright and proud against the sky.

He could feel the rock of the ship as she swayed from side to side, hear the thick clunk as the anchor cranked all the way up, chain wound round in long, lazy circles; then, shouts in German, in Bulgarian, as Anastasiy waved over at him as he stood by the ship’s wheel, spinning slowly, widely, through Rudy’s hands. There was the rush of wind in the sails, the gentle pressure as it was caught, bridled and controlled, and the ship slipped away from the bank and the quay, heading straight towards the centre of the lake, sitting low and dark in the water.

That had always been his favourite part of the trip: that gliding, rocking as the water buffeted them gently from side to side, stirred up by the wind, by the currents that moved deep in lakes as big as this one. It sang of a freedom, a loss of control, a challenge he loved.

His mother had told him once he had a sailor’s heart; that he was born with saltwater in his veins, calling to him from their home in Wismar, on the edges of the Baltic. He wasn’t sure he believed that – superstition was ridiculous, after all, and he didn’t remember anything of Wismar – but there was no denying that the sea, salty and deep and dangerous, suited him, and that he loved it in return.

In London it’s only a poor imitation: the long fingers of the sea creeping up into the heart of the city through the river snaking through tower and under bridges, but it’s familiar all the same.

The café they meet at is tucked off down a small, slender street in the City itself, round the backs of banks and law firms and government agencies; a bright, cheerful sort of place, mostly populated by suited and booted, solemn-faced employees, briefcases and phones in hand, always talking and moving, always anxious. It’s quiet, though, even when it’s busy – the lines of people passing through it leaving almost as soon as they arrive, takeaway coffee emitting grey puffs of steam.

As always, she’s there already, sitting at their usual table in the far corner, round the side and out of sight of the Muggle baristas – though not, as she had told him in a hushed voice, out of sight of the cameras looming overhead.

She looks tired, he notices, slipping inside and crossing over to the counter, muttering out an order for a mocha and a muffin without really thinking. He won’t eat the muffin and he will barely drink the mocha, so what does it matter?

“Hi,” she smiles at him warmly, though, and it makes the bags under her eyes vanish as her whole face flares up in the white overhead lights. “Sorry – I know we meant to meet later, but I have a meeting with Kings – with the Minister at half two, so I have to be back at the office by one to finish preparing.”

Even though she seems tired, everything about her voice and her face suggesting it, the words are business-like and swift, accompanied by a rueful smile. Even with the war, with the new, broken façade Britain sports, that she sports too, that at least hasn’t changed.

“It is not a problem,” he shrugs, sitting down opposite her, brushing a few stray crumbs off the table from in front of him, brown and crusty. “You’re having a lot of meetings.”

“Well, yes,” she acknowledges, a frown marring her forehead, and she crinkles her nose a little as she sips her coffee, riddled pale brown with milk. “And it’s a pain at times, I’ll admit, but it’s good. It means we’re making progress, that people are listening, and that’s all I really want.”

There’s hope in her voice and Viktor can’t work out what to say in response. Hope has never been good to him, has never helped him in things he had wished for and dreamed for.

He had hoped for the World Cup, twice now, and been denied both times. He had hoped for an end to Grindelwaldian propaganda in Bulgaria, in Germany; for an end to the whispered hatred which slid along walls and around corners in the streets of Europe, and what exactly had improved there?

All hope does to Viktor Krum is make him angry, make him restless and bitter and resentful.

(All it does to Hermione Granger is make her vibrant and passionate and beautiful, with the way it lights up her eyes and fills out her voice, but he tries not to think too long on that.)

Instead of replying immediately, he looks out of the window, at the orange cast of the sunlight on the brick walls, dropping down into a muddy, ash-covered black block at the bottom, flecks of grey and red here and there where the soot had been worn off by something, someone.

It reminds him of the sea, of the ship – but then it seems everything does these days. At times he feels he can’t escape from them, from that last, terrible, wonderful, brutal year. There had been orange and red and brown and black then, but cast in different ways and different tones, shimmering and less sturdy, all of it liquid.

On the horizon, the sun had been starting to waver, its strength diminishing as its death approached, when the ship finally rose into view, water cascading off it down in a miniature waterfall to join the lake’s body once more. It was a majestic sight with the flag on the topmost mast fluttering in the wind, the sails rippling, lit up pale orange by the lanterns dotted around the deck, a warm glow against the dark of the sky. As she settled, water splashed either side, fifteen feet high and ice cold, white-tipped counterpoints to the gloom, and the waves in the lake licked up the sides as she glided towards the jetty, smooth and stately.

It was even more impressive, he had always thought, when you considered that students sailed it alone, without direction or assistance. They were abandoned, in a way, on the ship: a handful of moments of freedom, caught in the middle of a tempest between the burdens of home and the rigours of school, where they could laugh and shout and swear, scurrying up and down masts like monkeys, pressure thrilling them to their core; playing at being pirates, rogues and scoundrels to the last.

A bit of piracy is good for the soul, though, right?

“Viktor?” Hermione’s voice, a ribbon of worry laced through it, shakes him out of his thoughts. “Are you alright? You seem very out of it today.”

“Fine,” he responds automatically, the word coming out sharper, brusquer than he intended it to be. “Just thinking.”

“Oh – oh!” she seems to jump a little, remembering something suddenly, and the look she gives him is sympathetic, almost verging on pitying. He doesn’t like it, a frisson of something itchy running down his spine. “I suppose you would be – I hadn’t thought, I’m sorry.”

Six years – sometimes he thinks it could hardly have been half that long. Six years, and yet sometimes it seems a lifetime has passed between then and now; as though someone else had lived through those tilting, crashing, shouting nine months. He wishes someone else had, but then would he be anything like the same? Would any of them be anything like the same?

Perhaps, if someone else had been there, had lived through all of that, he and Tamas would still be friends, would have spoken to each other beyond a couple of Christmas cards and that one angry, fearful letter; he’d know if he and Amery had lasted – he’d thought they would do, he’d wanted them to – he’d know if he ever got the research job he’d wanted, or if he’d gone into cursebreaking in the end, like his father had wanted. He’d know if he’d ever got rid of that stupid, long haircut, or if the tickets Viktor had got for him to the Quidditch World Cup final were still pinned to the board in his room in pride of place.

Perhaps, if someone else had been there, he wouldn’t be as much of a mess as he was now – slipping out of training, away from Transylvania and the oval, subterranean Vratsa Vultures stadium, to a tiny café in London, just to hear a different language, see a different skyline, to be somewhere different enough that he could forget and pretend, for a moment, that he didn’t feel guilt’s grasping, spiny fingers clutching at his chest in the dark.

Perhaps… but he isn’t much of a man for perhaps, in truth.

“Yes,” he murmurs, pressing the tips of his fingers to the coffee cup in front of him, the heat still pulsing off of it. “But don’t be. It was a long time ago – I don’t think about it much.”

A long time ago, but even as he says it he knows it’s a lie – as he sits there, he can see it so clearly, can hear it so clearly it’s as though he’d never left: how he looked over starboard, always over starboard, to see Astrid and a seventh year – Finnish and tall, with thin blonde hair – throwing the mooring ropes over the sides, wands raised to direct them, beige and snakelike, to wind themselves around and around and around the iron drums embedded in the stone, one at the bow and one at the stern. Slowly, they pulled the ship in together, creaking and easing, until her side lay flush against the stone jetty, and four of the fifth years could lay down the gangplank, locking it in place with metal screws.

A ragged cheer went up from the prefects, tinged with laughter – restrained and half-hearted – punctuated with shouts and rallying cries reminiscent of Quidditch matches and, on the bank, a tall, pale man smiled approvingly. His companion, strong and broad, clasped her hands behind her back and rocked to and fro on her heels, greeting a pair of students swinging off the ship.

“This is always the part I like the most,” Rudy said, throwing an arm about Viktor’s shoulders and giving a tired grin. “Arriving. No more stress about having to explain why half of the senior students are missing and the sails caught on fire – instead, food and warmth. Two of my favourite things.”

“I thought your favourite things were Transfiguration and beer,” Viktor commented idly, shoving his hands back in his pockets – his fingers were stiff from helping Rudy with the wheel, tightening bye-lines and breast lines and god only knew what else.

He was good at following instructions, and nimble enough to clamber up the rigging; really, Rudy had done most of the work, holding the course and adjusting it when the seas had got too rough, shouting to Anke to navigate a new way. In truth, he probably earned at least a beer for the trouble, favourite things be damned.

“Eh, men change,” Rudy yawned, as Nadezhda approached the two of them, her dark hair tied in a knot at the nape of her neck, not a hair out of place and her uniform immaculate; she might only be Head Girl in reality, but she had the bearing of a queen and a way of looking at someone which shattered confidence and crushed words as they built themselves on people’s tongues.

“I’ve let the others know they can start disembarking – the prefects are going to release them section by section. I’ll stay behind to see them all clear and the first years delivered, so you and the rest can go on ahead,” she told them both, her eyes flicking over them with a cool, sympathetic look. “Preferably before you pass out.”

“Spasiba,” Rudy smiled, the tip of his wand hovering around his throat. “You’re a godsend, really. Hey,” he called to the crew of the ship, half of them still lingering, the other half having already jumped onto land. “Head up, you lot! Everyone else is following!”

Viktor left Rudy there by the wheel, Kapitan and Head Boy and Admiral in one, and stalked across the gangplank just as a huddle of seventh years, red robes unkempt and high collars loosened, came up out of the double doors leading down into the belly of the ship, a burst of loud, excited German filling the air, and light catching the chestnut threads in the wooden floor.

As he breathed, the chestnut threads knotted into the floorboards of the ship sunk and twisted, tightening into messy, fraying spirals; the sounds of the ship, the voices and the thumps of boots and shoes on wood, fade, growing higher and lighter and fluted, until he blinks and finds himself studying the curls of Hermione’s hair, his name dropping from her mouth repeatedly.

“Viktor?” she asks again, and this time he looks back at her. “Are you sure you’re alright? You really don’t seem to be, and it’s very understandable if you’re not…”

She trails off, pursing her lips and giving him a small, sympathetic smile, her eyes flashing back down to the empty plate in front of her, scattered crumbs bearing evidence of a blueberry muffin once upon a time.

“God knows most of us aren’t,” she adds quietly, her fingers ghosting, feather-light, over the sleeve covering her left arm.

He knows what is written there – Mudblood, in mottled red still so many months after – and he knows what it means to her: a war wound, a badge of honour, and a brand on her skin she’ll never be rid of, that she refused to allow them to take from her.

_It is what I am and nothing more. I won’t hide that, and I won’t forget that._

He remembers her words, remembers the fire and the conviction in her voice, and for a moment, he’d been frightened and awed and humbled at once.

“Yes, I’m fine – sorry,” he apologises, the words jumping out a little quicker than he meant them to, and he wonders if it matters whether or not they’re really true, whether or not he can say them and know that they’re true.

Six years is a long time to not be fine and not really realise. It’s even longer to simply admit that there has been something, that it has gone so very wrong, and that still, even now, it isn’t fine.

Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t, but he will be, he has no doubt about that.

“If you ever want to talk about it…?” Hermione offers tentatively, still watching him closely. “I mean, if you think it would help – I know it helps me and Ron – Harry doesn’t, but then he’s a bit useless like that.”

“Of course,” he nods, giving her a genuine smile. He won’t, but the offer is nice all the same.

Silence fell, then – a soft, comfortable little thing which settles in the centre of their corner of the room, fending off the hurrying, racing customers who spin through the doors of the café – and in it, he wonders what would he say if he did talk about it. Where would he start? The beginning, the very beginning, was that first day of that long, wild year; it started, then, with the swish and the hush of the waves on the jetty being drowned under the footsteps as they bounced along the gangplank, strange rhythms beating into the wood as they all marched over it.

Off to one side, tucked behind one of the iron drums which lined it all the way up to the first sweep of the path, Jörmungandr’s Stair glittering in the distance, he had watched how the crimson flames in the dishes carved out in the tops of the drums flickered and danced over the stone jetty, delving the cracks deeper and the lines bolder, and tried to spot Ferdi and Tamas amongst the mess of red robes and fur coats.

The worst part was that Tamas had been a prefect, and so had been helping on deck as well – though on the bow, swinging up and down the foremast like a spider on a string of silk – so that he had vanished meant he’d fucked off somewhere, and that meant no one knew when he’d show up again.

Just when he was starting to think it was pointless to wait, that he’d have to climb the Stair alone (most of his year had been past: Kamilla and Maren had waved when they went by, Amery Lauritz and Rosenberg seemingly not noticing him at all, and he was sure he’d spotted Poliakoff in the mix somewhere, nose buried in a book as always), he heard a shout and craned his neck to see a stocky, brown-haired boy, hair flopping in his eyes, bounding over the edge of the ship towards him.

“Viktor!” Ferdi crushed him in a hug briefly before releasing him – and that he had missed somewhat, in the same way one misses being crushed by a bear. “You know, I should be angry with you – you didn’t visit! Even when you were in Groningen!”

“It was strictly professional – they didn’t give us any time for personal visits,” he grumbled in response, shoving Ferdi in the chest when the other boy only mock-glared and crossed his arms. “You know this. I told you before we left – and then before I went, and then when I went back home.”

“Ignore him, he’s grouchy because he got seasick again,” Tamas’ voice, accented and drawling, floated up and then he was there too, brushing long, dark hair out of his face – a perpetual habit; Viktor was pretty sure he’d been doing that when they’d first met – green eyes already rolling. “And look at you, Herr Superstar – got fatter, I see.”

“And you forgot to get a haircut,” Viktor observed, tilting his head a little. “Ilieva’s not going to like that.”

“Ilieva doesn’t like most things,” Tamas shrugged lazily, giving him a softer, genuine smile then. “Good summer, though?”

“Good,” Viktor nodded, ignoring Ferdi gesturing that they needed to go – they all knew, but it wasn’t as though they were novices. It was their sixth year; they’d all climbed the Stair before more times than they could count. They knew not to underestimate it.

“Mine was boring,” Tamas told him without prompting, adjusting his robes over his shoulders. “Though I did a lot of reading, and I did some preliminary research for my Alchemy project – my mother didn’t like it too much, but I only blew up the stove.”

“We should really go,” Ferdi interrupted them loudly; the only other people around were drifting into the fifth and fourth years, and the beginnings of the first years, gathering on deck under the beady eye of Nadezhda. “It’s starting to get a bit windy and all the good seats will be taken.”

They all looked up: along the Stair, Viktor could faintly see the wind nipping and picking, plucking at their comrades’ robes, rows of tiny red dots huddling close along the centre of the path, pressing as close as they dared to the sheer rock-face which lined it along one side. It was dark, the fires at the start of it blown this way and that in the wind, throwing the light out and down over the cliff which stretched on into a valley, and the Stair itself was barren, cloaked in shadow.

Durmstrang had been invisible, then, couched in the valley beyond, shielded from the elements sweeping in off the sea by a semi-circle of mountains, their peaks divided by the sky and the Stair; everything around had been bare for once, covered only in a thin dusting of snow, leaving the impressions of the land – the swells and the dips, the rocks and the holes – open to the eye. There was a wildness about it, something untameable and raw, but it felt as safe as anywhere could be.

He had been so certain then, when he looked up at it all, that the future was glittering, beautiful and bright, that the worst of the world was behind them.

(When he looks at Hermione in the café, with her tired, clever eyes, and her messy curls, he almost thinks that it still is.)


	2. Zwei

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ron, who makes her happy.

Zwei

As always, Viktor was the first awake, rolling over onto his side and hunching the sheet and blanket around his shoulders, pressing his face into the pillow and away from the light filtering into the room past the heavy, velvet curtains. It didn’t really work – it never had, as a tactic, but it was habit to try, at least – and he turned onto his back a moment later, keeping his eyes closed and listening to the occasional pair of footsteps down the corridor to one side of their rooms and the slow, deep snoring coming from his two roommates.

This was the best day of the year, without fail.

On the other side of the room, Ferdi rustled in his sleep, and Viktor smiled a little to himself – Durmstrang was full of rituals and traditions, and he had his own. He wouldn’t miss either.

Slipping out of bed and ignoring his roommates, he rifled through his trunk for his thick leather trousers and a thin t-shirt, throwing his pyjama bottoms on the bed as he swapped clothes for the morning. Grabbing his jacket and a pair of dragonhide gloves from the large, oak table by the door, he stepped out of the door, using his broomstick to push back the tapestry covering it.

Soon enough, he was off down the corridor, under the archway at the end, then working his way through the maze of classrooms and thin, winding passages, until he found himself in the Chapel courtyard. It was quiet – a group of fourth years were sat on the grass, talking in soft voices, and a solitary seventh year made her way across it (Viktor felt sure he should know her name – she was a prefect – but it was too early for pairing faces and names together), heading in the direction of the library.

The East Door was unlocked when he got to it, and it swung open with a screech of hinges, pushed by the wind outside as it bustled its way through the widening gap, catching at his hair and his clothes, the bristles in his broomstick clattering against each other.

He took three steps outside the door, swung his broomstick between his legs, and pushed off, shooting up and up and up into a mess of clouds and sky and sun.

Up high in the air there was a chill as the breeze bit and scratched at his face, stronger where it was freer, with nothing but him to push and pull and press against, nothing in sight for kilometres around: no birds, no flashes of brown and black scales on the horizon where the occasional wayward dragon would flutter and roar, plumes of smoke and tiny red flickers just about visible. It was silent, save for the rush and hiss of the wind in his ears as he dropped and dived, spun and banked upwards again.

Hovering in the air, he could see the entirety of Durmstrang spread out within the shade of the valley, sunlight filtering down between the mountains which encircled half of it, yellow beams setting the frosted grass to glittering, drawing out the gold on the tips of the spires decorating the castle’s towers and battlements. Further north, the steps on the sides of the Duelling Arena were dusted with a light coating of snow, the groundskeeper sweeping it off with the help of a pair of enchanted brooms, and the Quidditch pitch looked frozen, out in the wide, low plains on the east side of the school.

To the west lay the snakelike curves of Jörmungandr’s Stair, still dim even in the morning, and the stone-and-sand mixture of the harbour and the small, thin beach which trailed around the edge of the fjord; beyond that, there was only the sea.

At times like this, he realised just how isolated, how small and how protected Durmstrang was, with no other life around for hours, Muggle or magical, only vast plains of undisturbed countryside and tall, craggy mountains as far as the eye could see.

Sometimes, it makes it strange to be places which weren’t alone – to wander through the centre of cities, full to bursting with people, where even if you flew up a mile straight, there would still be squat, brown buildings littering the earth until the horizon, interjected with tall silver towers and the spires of cathedrals and castles. He knows it’s just what he’s used to, what he prefers, that it’s to do with more than just Durmstrang – the burdens and frustrations of fame in youth, the want for privacy – but it’s easier to just assign it somewhere to have sprung from.

Most people prefer things to be simple, after all.

He doesn’t know what he prefers, simplicity or complexity, but he thinks, watching Hermione order a coffee at the counter, that there’s no point wondering about it. You can’t stop things from being complicated, not really – and he tries not to notice that she looks happy, that she’s wearing a new necklace, gold and heart-shaped, that she’s put on lipstick and mascara today, that she’s fifteen minutes late and flushed, her hair mussed.

He’s seen the news, though, emblazoned across the Daily Prophet’s front page: TRUE LOVE FOR WAR HEROES.

Ignoring the swirling acid in his stomach, he smiles, small and more forced than he’d like – than it should be, he tells himself, than it should be – when she sits down opposite him.

“Do I say congratulations,” he comments. “Or is it not such a big thing?”

“Oh, yes, thank you,” Hermione beams, looking a little flustered as she fumbles with the clasp of her bag, putting her purse away. “It was very unexpected – we were still helping Harry, you know, the renovations are quite extensive and really, he can’t manage it all on his own – but Ron wanted to do it, and it felt right. Harry said he didn’t mind finishing the house on his own, though we’ve told him we’re still coming round to help with it…”

She blows on her coffee, stirring the milk in with the little wooden stick, as she pauses for breath.

“It’s nice,” she says after a pause, and her voice is soft and so content it makes Viktor’s chest constrict painfully. He takes a gulp of espresso to counter it and concentrates on not choking rather than the idea that Hermione might be in love – in love with Ron Weasley, of all people. “He’s nice – he makes me happy, and it feels so surreal, after everything…”

It’s the second time that day, the second time in a minute, that she trails off and this time it’s darker, deeper: she’s remembering, and he knows enough to know not to ask.

“It’s good,” he tells her instead, and she looks at him intently, as though she’s forcing herself to see him there – but her eyes are clear again, and that’s what counts. “To be happy. Even if it seems weird for a while.”

Flying had always been his first love, his only love, more than anything else: it relaxed him better and quicker than the team Mediwizards for Bulgaria and for the Vratsa Vultures could do with a deep tissue massage, unknotting the muscles in his back one by one by one until he felt lighter than a feather and utterly, blissfully peaceful. It was his stress-relief as well as his hobby, his career, his everything – and on this day, the first day of the year, the best day of the year, it had become his own, personal tradition.

When he landed, nearly three hours after he had first slipped out of the castle, the Chapel courtyard was noisy, and he wove his way past a group of girls standing around one of the benches, whispering and giggling; ducked out of the path of a pair of boys chasing each other, one’s face bright red, their friends laughing in the background; muttered a polite ‘guten Morgen’ to Professor Heimans as she made her way through the corridor, frowning a little. In the corridors, every minute or so he’d pass a group of younger students going the other way, German grammar textbooks in their hands, sheets of parchment stacked on top – homework carefully prepared over the summer.

It grew quiet again when he passed under the archway which led to his room, and there was no one around when he pushed back the tapestry concealing the door, pulling the key from his pocket at the same time. The metal was cold from the flight but he didn’t bother to warm it up, gritting his teeth and sliding it into the lock, giving it a rough shove to make it turn and click.

“Morgen!” he heard Ferdi chirp as he entered the room, closing the door behind him. “How was the flight?”

“Good,” he replied, not bothering to keep his voice down. There was no point – Ferdi had opened the curtains, flooding the room with sunlight; even Tamas couldn’t sleep through that. He was probably just hiding under his covers on principle (though what exactly that principle was, neither he nor Ferdi knew). “There wasn’t much wind or cloud.”

“It looks like good Quidditch weather,” Ferdi observed shrewdly – he was a terrible player but a great fan, with a head for statistics and tactics and a keen eye for fouls – before grinning. “Better than that storm at the Vultures-Arrows game.”

Viktor scowled, flinging his broomstick onto the pile of blankets on his bed and stripping off his gloves; that game was the single blot on a beautiful start to his career so, naturally, being a good friend Ferdi brought it up any time it was possible.

“Looking forward to the first Quidditch game of the season?”

He glances up at Hermione, the question jolting him out of his own mind and back to the present – in truth, he knows he’s missed most of what she’s said in the last couple of minutes, but she doesn’t look angry or upset, just cautious and curious, as though he were an interesting new species and she the discoverer. Maybe, actually, he thinks, it’s a bit more like she’s a therapist and he the patient; either way, he feels incredibly obvious to her.

It isn’t a normal thing for him, to feel so obvious – it feels exposing, makes him want to run away and hide somewhere.

“Of course,” he nods, realising that there had been silence for too long for an answer to such a simple question. “We’re starting at home. Then three matches in a row away, so there won’t be much time.”

“So, you won’t be back home until the…” Hermione frowns, her mind flicking through a calendar to work out the date, her white blouse bright in the lights of the café. “20th September?”

“27th September,” he corrects her with a wry smile. “The week after we have a Champions League match away as well.”

“Where are you going for that? I know Ron told me, but I can’t remember,” Hermione apologises, biting her lip a little – Viktor doesn’t know exactly how to feel: pleased that Hermione has asked about his schedule, or jealous because she’s asked Ron. Ron, who she’s moved in with. Ron, who she’s dating. Ron, who she’s been together with for the last year and a half now.

Ron, who makes her happy.

(It’s at times like this that he half-regrets that the old laws about duelling have been banned in England for a long time – since the murder of a prominent Ministry official in the late nineteenth century – because, even if he lost, at least it would give him some way to take out his frustration, some way to try and prove that he could be brave and gallant too.

He supposes hitting a war hero with a Beater’s bat isn’t really a good idea – not all publicity is good publicity, no matter what newspaper editors like to chirp.)

“Szekszárd, Hungary,” he tells her, and there’s a tug and a pang in his chest, because he knows that city, knows it so well – it’s Tamas’ city, and the thought of going there and not seeing him, if Tamas is even still there (and god, he doesn’t even know where his best friend is living), is unsettling, unnerving.

Sitting there, reminded of Tamas and Szekszárd, all the summer days wandering down dusty alleys, running through shaded forests just outside the city herself, spending afternoons in Tamas’ room and his father’s study, pouring over books and wizards’ chess, tossing a Quaffle back and forth until something got broken – and just as quickly repaired – Viktor almost forgets why he’s going there, why he needs to go there.

For the first time ever, he thinks that maybe he could fake an injury – pull a muscle or something in the last training session before they’re due to leave, could come down with the flu two days before and have to stay at home.

It’s ridiculous and childish and petty, and it’s all born out of fear.

Sometimes, it’s hard to think that those days are all entirely gone, days of pushing and shoving each other, of poking Tamas’ shoulder in the morning to wake him up – sometimes, though, sometimes, he and Ferdi together would have to shake him awake, getting invited to either lie down with him or fuck off.

Almost a year ago, he’d been sitting on Tamas’ bed, leaning against the headboard, listening to Tamas and Ferdi bickering in the background, the endless debate of Vronksy versus Levin continuing on after the summer break.

Apparently, they’d both taken the time to rearm themselves, instead of just forgetting about it.

“No, it’s not that he’s cruel, he just doesn’t understand,” Tamas was telling Ferdi. “It’s a demonstration of the way society’s set up – prejudiced against one party for a particular behaviour, but allowing another party to do the same without suffering the same. That’s the point. Vronksy’s not a bad guy, he’s just oblivious.”

“Bah, whatever,” Ferdi waved Tamas’ comments away, ignoring the protesting huff which came from the mound of bedcovers Tamas was wrapped in. “Levin is still a better man, no matter what you say.”

“Viktor?” he looked down at the sound of his name being called to see Tamas staring up at him, green eyes glinting in the sunlight, his hair splayed over his pillow and his neck in wild, messy curls. “You agree with me, right?”

Viktor just shrugged; he’d never read Anna Karenina, and didn’t really want to if this was what he’d be subjected to if he did.

“Arschloch,” Tamas muttered playfully, prodding Viktor’s thigh. “Get up – I need to have a shower.”

Above Tamas’ head, Viktor and Ferdi exchanged a grin, both leaning back and adjusting position, draping arms over his legs and head, keeping the shorter boy trapped in his bed. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to earn themselves a glare and a shared high-five.

“Arschloch!” Tamas exclaimed, punching Viktor in the arm and pushing his covers off, beginning to climb over them to get out, a hand fluttering to the waist of his pyjamas. “If you go to lunch without me, I’m hexing both of you.”

“Every year,” Ferdi sighed fondly, his blue polo-neck jumper pale against the deep red of the bedcovers and the canopy. “Starts it all off just the right way.”

The coffee in his hands is cold – he doesn’t know how long it’s been like that, murky brown and undrinkable, but he thinks it’s been at least five minutes – and across the table, Hermione is giving him a concerned look again, her brow furrowed and her lips pinched together, sympathetic and worried. She’d shaken his hand, her fingers resting on the back of his knuckles, to get his attention, and he attempts a smile to reassure her.

“I really do think,” she begins, a tone of business-like bossiness in her voice; honestly, he mostly just finds it sweet. He’s stubborn and she’s bossy; they’re a pair. “That you should talk to someone. Something’s bothering you – it’s obvious. You keep drifting off and thinking about something else. You can’t keep things in forever, it doesn’t work. Sooner or later, things have got to come out.”

He glances at her briefly, and then back down at the table, his fingers migrating from around the coffee cup to play idly with the thin paper napkin the barista had given him with it, separating out the sheets one by one, tugging them apart slowly, carefully, so as not to rip them.

“It isn’t easy for me,” he gets out after a long, pregnant pause. “Talking so much feels weird.”

“I know,” she says quietly, and her dark eyes are brimming with an understanding and a ghost of something he doesn’t know how to deal with. “But sometimes that’s why you have to talk.”

The air around them seems to settle then, calm and sad and gentle, even as other patrons of the café come and go, paper cups of coffee and tea clutched in their hands, the wisps of smoke rising from the tops coiling and vanishing quickly in the sunlight. No one looks at them, no one around thinks anything of them – a boy and a girl sitting together at a table, an untouched coffee and the crumbs of a flapjack between them – no one there, suited and chic and professional in every sense of the word, would ever suppose that they’re from another world, that in their world they’re a war hero and a sports star, that there they can’t breathe without the paparazzi clamouring to catch it.

It’s freeing and exhilarating and oddly lonely all at once; and he loves it more than he’s loved most things in a long while.

“I read about the Minister’s speech,” he mentions, tentative and quiet, changing the subject quickly and clearly, feeling the muscles in his arms and back relax once it is done. “About the redrafting process and the rights proposals.”

A fire flares in her eyes, fervent and loud, and her knuckles turn white as they grip the cup, tight and strong and tense. It takes her a moment or two to respond; he can almost see her ordering her thoughts, tempering her anger and her passion with the cool, calm logic she had mastered years before.

He wonders how it is to live like that – always tempering, always calming and cooling, never quite shouting as loud as she wants, never screaming it out in the faces of those who refuse to listen, to learn and to bend. It’s not his way, not what he learned from his father and his mother, from his grandmother and the stories, fierce and bloody, they told him when he was young.

History lives on, in his blood and in his body, in the land he walks every day and names home; how do you forget that? How do you move on and past that?

“He told me about it before he spoke to the press,” Hermione says quietly, and there’s a respectful, tired tone in her voice. “The purebloods still hold a lot of power in the Wizengamot – they’ll block everything he tries to put through if it’s too quick and too much. It has to be slower, subtler, a series of steps towards the end goal.

“It makes sense,” she adds quickly, a frown – half-guilty, half-frustrated – slipping onto her face. “But I don’t like it. I can’t like it – not when it means that people like me are still disadvantaged and vulnerable. I understand but… it’s not enough anymore.”

“It should not be enough,” he agrees, his voice stronger, harsher than hers is. “Otherwise nothing will change. Change has to be forced.”

She smiles, bright and small, her eyes glittering and her lips curving upwards, smooth and plump with the lipstick catching a line of light along her bottom lip. There’s a bunch of curls falling over one shoulder, waving around close to her eyes, shading half her face, and he half wants to lean over and kiss her, brush the hair over her shoulders and kiss her softly, briefly.

“Exactly! And it’ll always come, in the end. Change always happens, even when people resist,” she nods, beaming and satisfied and happy; he feels his stomach twist a little, feels his heart jump and kick.

“Resistance is hatred,” he quotes idly – it fits so well, so neatly, and she smiles so beautifully, that it takes him a moment to remember where it’s from, whose tongue and mouth spat those words out, thoughtful and philosophical and damning.

_Resistance is hatred – hatred of whatever and whomever it is they fight against. Wherever it is found, it must be doused, carefully and gently, and replaced with love, contentment and hope._

_Otherwise, it eats away at everything in society – it is a parasite, feeding off those who are most vulnerable and so we must protect them._

Protection and hatred, a vat of oil flung over already smouldering coals, sending the flames bursting up towards the sky and the smoke twisting into a column, a signal – a warning to the rest. Protection, then, from hatred; protection masquerading as hatred; hatred hiding behind protection – and history is always dependent on who you ask, whose words you read and with which mouth you speak.

He remembers the news, the day it emerged that Karkaroff had been found dead, his body abandoned, bloody and battered and broken, in a shack in the north of England; murdered on the orders of a madman he had chosen to follow. Murdered by a cause he had believed in all his life, by all accounts.

In Bulgaria, in Durmstrang, he would not be missed.

The second day of that year, when the world had tilted and turned, off-kilter and off-balance, on Gnabenfrist – his favourite day, normally his best day – Karkaroff had stood in the Great Hall, draped in sombre brown, amber cufflinks glittering at his wrists, emeralds set in gold on his fingers, and smiled, oily and sly, down at them all. There had been shadows on the walls as the sun sailed in her slow circle around the sky, but there hadn’t been a chill in the air or cold fingers down his spine, no sixth sense of dread or unease; nothing at all.

He sat there, his chair wedged tight between Tamas and Ferdi’s, a pretty dark-haired fifth year opposite him, his head turned to the left to see the top table and his fingers drumming a silent, impatient beat on the table. Hungry, he was only half paying attention to the speeches – the usual notices of no flying at night or detention, no duelling in the corridors or outside the duelling arena or detention, no wandering the corridors beyond curfew or detention…

Then, Tamas nudged him hard in the ribs and jerked his head to the left and Viktor, clenching his stomach muscles in a vain attempt to stop his stomach from rumbling, reluctantly fixed his attention on the Headmaster.

“– may know, this year continues the fiftieth anniversary of the War of Secrecy,” he was saying, his mouth pinched and curled in distaste as he looked down at the rows of red-robed students. “And so the school will continue its remembrances of the events during those years. This school will not tolerate any displays, openly or otherwise, of political ideologies, no matter which group or country they may come from or be associated with, and regardless of personal family associations.”

Karkaroff’s eyes, dark and beady, seemed to linger on another boy in Viktor’s year, tall and dark-haired and German, and then land on him, disdainful and faintly, rudely amused by something Viktor couldn’t name.

It was a warning and a challenge, and Viktor gritted his teeth, feeling his jaw lock and his arms tense.

To command Durmstrang to be neutral was stupid – Durmstrang had never been neutral in its life, had never even known neutrality. Durmstrang oscillated between extremes, political and magical, personal and physical, temporal and spiritual, rocking like the ship which brought the students to the castle, even as it ploughed doggedly forwards through the water. It melded different parts and places together, metals and stones and woods all in one, with sheer force of will and a sense that there they all shared something, whether it was blood or spirit or bone.

Earthly, raw things like emotions didn’t come into it – hatred and love both thrived at Durmstrang, blossoming red and blue, but the school wasn’t forged on them, wasn’t made for them.

It was so different from Hogwarts, he muses, glancing over at Hermione, a living symbol of her school in a sense, which teemed with life, even when it was darkest, even when everyone was asleep. Hogwarts never really stopped, but in Durmstrang, there was a start and an end to every day, there was a dark and a light, and the two did not so much as merge as give way to one another. It suited the school: the idea of clashing extremes, of twinned and twined ideals, when its own students were so very, very different.

Durmstrang, he decides, assembles order out of chaos; Hogwarts does exactly the opposite.

(The trouble is, he thinks, remembering how he’d tipped his chair back onto two legs, oblivious and smarting from the Headmaster’s glare, remembering how in such a short space of time there had been blood streaking the walls, sinking into the stone and the wood, that when order breaks down, there is only chaos left; and at Durmstrang, chaos blew in off the sea, a storm of heat and anger, and the waves, boiling and bubbling, would drown them all.)

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: so this is being written for Camp NaNo in July, though I jumped the gun and started way too early, as you can tell :P It's a bit of a baby of mine: a combination of so many things I love (history, politics, philosophy, life lessons, angst) and involves many things dear to me. 
> 
> It's not going to be as dark and grim and all-hope-is-lost as it sounds, but there will be plenty of angsting over issues and things, so please bear that in mind ;) 
> 
> Also, no relation to current events is intended - though many issues, of course, are on-going and are similar enough in some ways for parallels to be drawn. But I'm not meaning to make any kind of political statement or to imply that this is how things can or should be solved in real life. It's still fiction and it's a fictional situation and fictional characters dealing with fictional incidents they have faced - nothing more ;) 
> 
> Please feel free to let me know if there are any language mistakes - I'm not fluent in either Russian or German and always happy to learn! - or if I missed highlighting any words in italics, or if people would prefer translations at the bottom :)


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